Oh, won't you just shut up?
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vapors
The woman, a 23-year-old identified as Jane Doe in Manhattan Supreme Court papers, says she made it through undergraduate studies at the Greenwich Village university with a 3.7 grade-point average while battling cancer — but now claims in a suit against the school that she can’t focus on her studies because of trauma stemming from her encounters with professor Emanuele Castano.
The 43-year-old Italian native was the recipient of the prestigious National Education Association grant in 2016 when he started “grooming [Doe] for a sexual relationship,” the suit says.
Doe claims the divorced dad plied her with booze and pot after inviting her to dinner with him and his son at his home on March 3, 2017.
The student claims the professor “advanced himself on me, but didn’t stop to ask me whether I was OK with this,” after the boy had gone to sleep.
She continued sleeping with Castano, but felt that he exploited her as she was still recovering from lymphoma, the suit claims.
Their relationship deteriorated after Doe discovered Castano was sleeping with a post-doctoral student, according to court papers.
Last July, Doe complained to school administrators, saying in a statement, “I had sexual intercourse, unwillingly, with my boss/professor/advisor over 10 times.”
She says school officials took months to investigate, even though there’d been a previous sexual misconduct complaint about Castano in 2012 and a letter stating that a student had asked to be transferred after Castano had group sex with her classmates.
I'm the father of two daughters, and would certainly be tempted to "interview" this professor in my role as Pappa Bear, but I also am still able to recall who I was at 23, what I was capable of, and saying "bugger off" was one of those capabilities. Harvey Weinstein is an awful, awful human being and a creep, but a young starlet who sleeps with him is a prostitute, selling her body in exchange for a film role. And a 23-year-old graduate student peddling her ass for a good grade is just as sorry an example of adulthood as her Hollywood peers.
If we're really determined to reverse 100 years of history and return women to sheltered, protective homes where they'll be guarded by fathers and husbands, fine: let's announce that and be done with it. I myself prefer strong, independent women who can think and fend for themselves in all areas of life, including sexual relationships (and decide how to vote for themselves, Hillary).
At 23, George Armstrong Custer was a Brigadier General (we'll ignore his impetuous behavior twelve years later, in 1876); today, at 23, men and women with the rank of Second and First Lieutenant are expected to lead their troops into combat. In the age of the nanny state, we're all considered infants, but surely there should be some age of maturity, somewhere: I think 21 is a good place to start.
